The Post has not opined on a more reliable method to learn what the Court’s decision will be: chill out and wait for the Court to issue its decision next week. But they have pages to fill; one can forgive a bit of silliness.

The Court did, however, issue four opinions today, in some of the big cases on its docket.

What were they?

First, the Court held that when Congress passed a law called the “Fair Sentencing Act” it meant that the law should make sentencing more fair.

As many people recall, a few years ago a Senator ran for President. He was bold and progressive. He called for healing the divides in this great country and talked about the importance of reforming our nation’s drug laws.

But the President and his administration did one great thing for our drug laws: they changed the mandatory minimum sentences that apply to crack cocaine.

In the past, a person who sold crack needed to sell one-hundredth of the same amount of powder to be subject to the same mandatory minimum sentence. Because many of the folks who use crack are African American, many people, including Obama, thought that was racially problematic (in the sense that it’s racist).

Under the Fair Sentencing Act, which the Administration did much to get passed, that ratio was changed to 18 to 1. It’s still racially problematic, just less so. That’s change you can believe in.

A question arose: how will the Fair Sentencing Act apply to people who committed their offense before the law passed, yet still remained to be sentenced.

The Seventh Circuit, under the doctrine of “Too Bad, So Sad,” held that because the law did not specify an effective date, it only applied to people who committed their crime after the Act was passed.

The New York Times opposed the Seventh Circuit’s position. So there was a split in authority.

Among other reasons (having to do with the details of the presumption of retroactivity of the Sentencing Reform Act, which I find interesting but, I would bet, you don’t), the Court noted that construing the Fair Sentencing Act to only apply to people who sold crack after the law passed would make things crazy and arbitrary in a way that we all try to pretend our criminal justice system isn’t.

So the Fair Sentencing Act applies to everyone! Happy day. There were four dissents, and I’d bet that any reader of this blog can guess them.

In other criminal justice news, the Court held that the rule in Apprendi – that a judge can’t raise the statutory maximum of a person’s sentence based on any fact not found by a jury and proven beyond a reasonable doubt – applies to fines.

The “person” here was Southern Union – a person in the Citizens United sense of “person”. The case was Southern Union v. United States. Justice Sotomayor delivered the Court’s opinion, joined by the Chief, Scalia, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Kagan. Breyer – that notorious Apprendi-hater – wrote a dissent joined by Kennedy and Alito.

The Court also made life harder for unions today. Justice Alito wrote for the Court. As he framed the issue, the case dealt with:

“whether the First Amendment allows a public-sector union to require objecting nonmembers to pay a special fee for the purpose of financing the union’s political and ideological activities.”

Finally, the Court issued the long awaited decision in FCC v. Fox. This is, of course, the case involving both Paris Hilton’s use of the F-word on live television, and the “nude buttocks of an adult female character [which] were shown for approximately seven seconds and the side of her breast for a moment” on live television.

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